The good news: Todd Blanche should win confirmation in the US Senate this week and fully succeed Pam Bondi as Attorney General. The bad news, at least for the White House: The anti-weaponization fund got spiked as the cost of doing business with John Cornyn and Thom Tillis.
Blanche made the retreat official last night:
Breaking overnight: The White House believes it has a deal with GOP senators to advance Todd Blanche’s nomination out of the Senate Judiciary Committee after days of frenzied negotiations.
Blanche issued a formal document stating that the order creating the controversial $1.8 billion anti-weaponization fund is “rescinded” with “no force or effect.” A second document affirms Blanche’s confirmation hearing testimony on the limits of President Donald Trump’s tax audit immunity deal.
Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) had blocked Blanche’s path through the Judiciary Committee until the Justice Department formally agreed to narrow the immunity deal and scrap the weaponization fund.
It wasn't just Cornyn and Tillis that threatened to sink Blanche over the fund and immunity deals. Cornyn and Tillis, both of whom hold grudges with Trump for different reasons, sit on the Judiciary Committee, which has to vote to send Blanche's nomination to the full Senate. If both of them vote against Blanche, John Thune would have to override the committee to call the nomination to the floor. And that's where the real problem would have emerged:
Several Republicans who don’t serve on the Judiciary panel have raised concerns about Blanche’s nomination. The Cornyn deal could ease their objections as well. Some GOP senators have been relying on the Texas Republican’s judgment throughout the Blanche talks.
The anger over the two deals went well beyond Cornyn and Tillis. The Senate Republican caucus made that much clear months ago, concerned over the optics of the audit immunity as well as a lack of oversight over the anti-weaponization fund. Some had raised concerns about the back-door appropriation of the money through a lawsuit settlement rather than creating it through the budget process with congressional approval. It has been a sticking point for weeks between Senate Republicans and the White House.
Rather than risk a split over Blanche, Donald Trump apparently chose to pick his battles more carefully. Trump has yet to post anything about this on Truth Social, but as the WSJ points out, it will require Trump to agree to the withdrawal:
The fund, which could have been used to pay Trump allies, and the audit protections were a product of a controversial settlement between Trump and his own administration. That pact ended a lawsuit filed by the president against the Internal Revenue Service for a contractor’s illegal leak of his tax returns.
It isn’t clear whether the Justice Department’s new commitments are legally binding. The text of the deal creating the fund said that it could be changed only with agreement of all of the parties who signed it, including the IRS, the Justice Department and Trump in his personal capacity.
Neither the White House nor Sen. Thom Tillis (R., N.C.), the other key GOP holdout, immediately responded to requests for comment.
Trump threatened on Saturday to push for legislation to compensate his allies if Cornyn and Tillis didn’t support Blanche. In recent days, the president also suggested he could temporarily withdraw Blanche’s nomination and reissue it after Cornyn and Tillis are out of office at the start of 2027.
The reversal by Blanche within 36 hours of that threat speaks to its lack of impact. Part of the problem Republicans want to avoid is having this damage the GOP's midterm prospects. The House will likely go to Democrats, thanks to the usual dynamics of midterm elections (and the 6.4-point gap in the current generic congressional ballot polling aggregate), but the Senate is still salvageable. Republicans need to put an end to the feuds and the controversies dogging the upper chamber and the White House. Otherwise, it's possible that Trump will awake on January 3rd to find out that none of his appointees have a prayer of winning confirmation, perhaps especially Blanche. The anti-weaponization fund and the plenary immunity from IRS audits are not worth that risk, especially if Trump has to replace a Supreme Court justice in his final two years in office.
Better to ask Congress to address the weaponization fund legislatively and end the feud now, rather than carry it into a Congress where Democrats control both chambers. This is a wiser move in the end, even if it doesn't exactly look like good news in the moment from the White House.
Editor's Note: The Democrat Party has never been less popular as voters reject its globalist agenda.
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